Books & Ideas
The poem begins with the routine event of chopping parsley, a serious and yet absurd musing on a nursery rhyme known to all — three blind mice — and quickly spins into a quiet meditation on the sneaking cynicism that prevents us from feeling, and then, in shame, makes us feel all the more.
The overflow crowd gathered at the Chilmark Public Library to hear renowned Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz on Wednesday evening did not know it going in, but they were about to hear from an indicted felon.
An international criminal, if you will, for his offense was not committed in this country but in Italy.
In summary, the circumstances are these: Several years ago an Italian newspaper contacted him, seeking his views on an Italian judge who had freed a group of terrorists, on the basis that they were actually “freedom fighters.”
By HOLLY NADLER
A trademark of the boomer generation is that we never follow a straight line for a career path. It looks more like a privet hedge labyrinth in old English country gardens.
Bright Waters, Shining Tides: Reflections on a Lifetime of Fishing, paintings and essays by Kib Bramhall, Vineyard Stories, Edgartown, 2011. 96 pages. Hardcover, $29.95.
I know of three painters who are also enviably good writers, all of them Vineyard men by birth or choice.
Stand here and there, old Vineyard homes,
All wrapped in deep content.
— Emma Mayhew Whiting
They’re painting all the houses white in Edgartown,
capping flat pickets to fences around resplendent lawns,
cut on a diagonal. The parade is just around the corner.
Sit at the spinning wheel in the keeping room, scrimshaw
on the mantel. The crane swings in the high fireplace
and the streets are filled with shouts for
To launch the publication of The Complete Plays of Sophocles, translator Robert Bagg will speak at the West Tisbury library on Wednesday, July 27 from 5 to 6 p.m.